Project Manager Influencing Skills

With the increasing amount of project management work being undertaken in many organisations throughout the world, this course is designed to give students the opportunity to assess their current influencing skills in a safe environment.

Specifically, it examines those situations where advancing the project will depend to a large extent on certain personal interactions not usually covered by project management training per se.

The Social Mechanics of Organisation

The principle objective of this course is to understand working environments as organised productivity precariously constrained by relationships of power and personal ambition. As such it draws heavily upon a wealth of literature from the management sciences in response to the 'third wave of customer care' and the advance of call centres. A huge area of future development of strategic advance taking them from customer control centres into knowledge processing units.

This course has been designed for line managers and customer facing supervisors, covering in some detail the implementation of work based initiatives and systems recommendations for the successful management of self and others. Background article

Leading the Challenge

This course concentrates on examining the emerging role of the hybrid manager to be found within progressive organisations. That is, boundary spanning individuals, who are able to move more freely and credibly within a complexity of disciplines and levels of interactive expertise.

Such people generate the essential enthusiasm to either implement or reject those vital innovative processes, upon which the success of the organisation has become so increasingly dependent.

Reaching Full Potential

A course designed for both experienced and new starter trainers, which is able to take their learning well beyond those levels most associated with presentation skills. Special emphasis is placed on the emotional and psychological relationship developed between the trainer and a group of learners, through highlighting the responsibilities that they have for being able to successfully translate classroom learning into real situations for application 'back at the ranch'.

Corporate and Occupational Filmed Ethnography (COFE)

Designed to evaluate organisational procedures, performance and operational effectiveness through interactive videos, aimed at a knowledgeable audience using filmed research as the subtle instrument of learning.

As such it is able to capture on film aspects of organisational behaviour, providing factual evidence for the design of jobs; corporate restructuring and assessments for planned maintenance programmes.

COFE will assist organisations to look more subjectively at their own operational effectiveness and the associated processes and performance targets. It enables clients to identify specific areas of concern or 'organisational pain' often to be interpreted as a signal that something is wrong. (Lawrence 1954 & Bauer 1995)

In essence, it allows clients to evaluate their strategic options, permitting a rehearsal of conflict well in advance and to calculate the short and long-term prizes along with the costs involved.